Saturday, January 14, 2012

Apparently Hollywood content providers (Disney, Time-Warner, Viacom, News Corp., etc.) and the unions who have contracts with them (DGA, SAG, IATSE) have hit a rough patch with internet legislation ("Stop Online Piracy Act") that they favor:

Hollywood has a potential new adversary in its effort to pass expansive antipiracy legislation: President Obama.

A message posted on a White House blog on Saturday says that the Obama administration acknowledges the threat that foreign websites pose but it “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” ...

Bad news for Hollywood players. If SOPA goes down, they will need to develop other strategies to keep internet pirates from stealing movies and television shows.

Goldman Sachs pays the top minds millions to develop software for high speed trading that earns them billions for basically doing nothing. Internet hackers are doing essentially the same thing, only with reverse engineering, and without investing much money at all.

It's exactly like asymmetric warfare, ie, Irag and Afghanistan. On one side, you have the Americans pouring billions, trillions even, into the highest technology and most precise military in the world. Then, on the other side, you have the guy with the cell phone and the black market ordinance who detonates IED's. There are always two sectors to economies, those who operate in the light, and those in the dark. No civilization has ever existed without both, or managed to eradicate the black market.

Now ur getting it big boy! And CDO's and CDS's and FIRE's and every other bullshit financial acronym that doesn't add a single cent of real wealth or productivity into the economy. Just like SOPA. Just like piracy.

Some people are making some interesting assumptions about my comment regarding Mr. Hope and Change. I'm not a Republican. I'm an Independent. And preventing theft of ANYONE'S property is something I would think most people, regardless of their political persuasion, could get behind. How exactly is government passing a law aimed at preventing the theft of intellectual property anti-conservative anyway? Yeesh.

Fine, independent who used to be a Republican who voted for George Bush twice. I run into a lot of those these days. Or did you not vote for a decade also.

And no one is saying theft of property is ethical. I believe the argument is SOPA would be about as effective as Guantanamo detention facilities and Arizona immigration laws. You obviously are not schooled in how hacking works, and why most of Silicon Valley thinks the law is shite.

Now ur getting it big boy! And CDO's and CDS's and FIRE's and every other bullshit financial acronym that doesn't add a single cent of real wealth or productivity into the economy. Just like SOPA. Just like piracy.

I can see you're clueless about the financial industry. Keep believing the bullshit spread by people that don't know dick about these things.

If you ever bought stock or had a 401k, then you can thank HFTs for providing you with the ability to do so at a reasonable cost.

Most of these blowhards are upset because they no longer are able to rip off traders like they had been doing for years (ex. Joe Saluzzi). Or they are just ignorant of how the market works and recycle the idiocy of others without looking into it themselves.

If you didn't have HFT, you'd have super wide spreads, no liquidity in the markets, ETF tracking indices or replication of baskets wouldn't happen. HFTs do all of these things. They are basically doing the same thing that market makers did before them. Except faster.

People are getting upset because these firms make money. To say that they don't add value is short sighted and ignorant of what they do and how they do it.

If you remove them from the market, people will just start complaining about floor traders or whatever other group is making money.

"The free market" is the idea that legitimate buyers and sellers can meet to freely bargain for the best price on goods.

"The free market" is not the idea that it is OK to take someone else's goods and give it away for free.

You entertainment titans certainly are correct to say it's wrong for someone to not pay you for your goods. You just need to come up with a better solution than SOPA that doesn't disregard everyone else's rights that are not about stealing your entertainment product.

For the record, I'm not a fan of dark pools. The whole thing was started so that institutions could hide their intentions on big orders.

In a perfect world, they wouldn't even exist. I find it ironic that institutional traders wanted dark pools to begin with and now are complaining about them the most. Not because they dislike the idea of them, but because HFTers are using them too. They want their own private little playground so that they can make the pennies. How one trader gets pissed at another trader(HFT) is beyond me.

Because of their bottom line shrinking. They go on this crusade against HFT. Trying to restore their previous profits. The public is force fed a bunch of untrue garbage. All in an effort to get rid of HFT so that Sal/Joe can go back to making bank.

It is funny how people like Sal Arnuk and Joe Saluzzi come along and complain about liquidity and getting "screwed" by HFTs. Trying to paint such a negative picture. But what they don't tell you is that they themselves are pinging these dark pools for liquidity prior to their orders going to the NBBO (national best bid/offer). All to make a little extra coin. If these guys stayed out of the dark pools, they could hit the NBBO and guess what? liquidity would be there.

They don't want dark pools to go away. They want HFTs out of dark pools so they can make that penny, not the HFTers. The only way to do that is to continue the crusade.

Sal/Joe are taking advantage of people that don't understand how the markets work. They are the ring leaders in the media trying to bring an end to HFT. Not because it is evil or messing up the market. It is because they're own trading profits have diminished. (Most of that can be attributed to stupidity, like pinging dark pools to notify the world of your intentions).

For the record, I believe there needs to be some oversight on HFTs. A few of them are probably doing things that they shouldn't. Not illegal, but borderline questionable. They are the minority and need to be controlled. However, the majority of HFT is legit and needed to keep the market efficient and affordable so that we can invest in companies that we believe in.

-And yes, I am a trader in the markets. But I also invest in companies as well for the long term.

The thoughts and observations of the leaders of The Animation Guild (TAG), Local 839 IATSE. Jason MacLeod is the Business Representative, Laura Hohman is the President. Mike Sauer is Assistant to the Business Representative.

This weblog reflects their individual personal opinions and does not necessarily represent the official position of the Animation Guild.

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